Moth To A Flame
by StitchAndRepair
Summary: Ian was drawn to Mickey like a moth to a flame


Ian was never the type of person to be attracted to a flame; he never felt the urge to press nearer and nearer until he got burned. He was always the person who poured a bucket of water over the flame to stop his idiot brother from burning his fingertips. He was never the person that barreled into something dangerous if he already knew the consequences. He was safe. He was sensible. But this - Mickey. It was different. Mickey was the biggest, brightest flame that Ian had ever met, dangerous and thrilling and he went against everything that Ian was about.

Yet Ian was still tempted, far too tempted, and he couldn't stop himself from edging closer and closer, and he knew how it was going to end, he knew the consequences. He knew it was bad for him. But the closer he got, the more the heat of the flame warmed his face, the closer it got to becoming something more than dangerous, the less he cared.

Sometimes Mickey seemed so inhuman that Ian questioned his own sanity. He questioned constantly how he could want someone so badly that doesn't think twice about hitting someone with their car over a sum of money, someone who had loose morals, looser than his own, and seemingly no conscience.

Nothing about their relationship made sense to him, nothing about Mickey made sense to him, but Ian couldn't bring himself to give it up. He wanted to spend his hours with Mickey, unraveling him, piece by piece until he knew every single part of him. He wanted to piece him back together in exactly the same way too, wanting nothing to change, not one thing.

Ian had spent hours lying wrapped in the sheets of his own bed, confused and something close to happy and thinking of his day spent with Mickey, piecing together everything that had been said, the flare of electricity that shot between them when their skin brushed together, the constant glare in Mickey's eyes that didn't match the light, husky tones of his laugh that were unfamiliar in the way Ian didn't hear them often enough. Mickey was like a puzzle and Ian never knew what to expect, never knew which version of Mickey he was going to see.

Ian liked it. He liked being kept on his toes. Mickey used to intimidate him with how fast his mood would crash, but Ian was used to him now. He knew what pushed Mickey's buttons, what made him angry, what got him off, what made the corners of his mouth turn up in something close to a smile. He could, now, always spot the tension in Mickey's shoulders even under several layers; he knew the spot to run his hand over to rub the knot of tension out of them, knew the words to say to make Mickey's skin prickle and his head tip forward in a different kind of tension.

He knew most things about Mickey. And he liked all of them. He liked all the parts of Mickey that he shouldn't. He liked the scowl on his lips when he spoke to customers, he liked the threats he made to thieves coming in the store. He liked the line that formed between Mickey's eyebrows after hours of frowning. But it was the moments when Mickey showed Ian a side to himself that nobody else got to see that Ian liked the most.

It was in moments when they're spread-eagled on the middle of the baseball pitch, nothing but the occasional sounds of traffic going by on the road across from them, when Mickey is nothing like the person he was just hours ago. 

When he was quiet and his eyebrows were drawn down in thought rather than forced down to appear intimidating, when he had a cigarette in his mouth that he didn't even really smoke, just wore between his lips like an accessory.

It was moments when Ian said something like, "my mom taught me how to dance, when I was six"

And Mickey would nod and reply with something like "my mom taught me how to throw a punch. She threw a better right hook than anyone I've ever met"

It was moments like that when it all made sense to Ian. Past the thrill of danger that comes with their relationship, past the excitement of Mickey, past everything else, they were just two broken boys who had found something in each other - Something that nobody else understood.

There were holes in both of them, jagged and ripped open so wide that they could never, ever be filled. Ian knew that. They had both felt the sense of loss. Of someone leaving. Of the stability and their protection gone, ripped out from under them. To be gone and to not _want_ to come back. They both knew what it felt like to blame themselves, be so angry with everyone around them, to have nobody else understand just quite what that meant.

They knew self-loathing and they knew anger. They knew what it was like to walk into a room, filled with furniture and people and _thing_s and for it to still be so empty.

They knew what it meant to be alone. To feel alone.

And the people at school that Ian was forced to talk to, the social workers and counselors and sometimes even his brothers and sisters – they would all talk to him about _moving on_ and _getting past it_ and, fuck, he should. He knew he should. But he couldn't. His mom left him; left them. She had found out Ian's secret and three days later she was gone. And the two things probably weren't even connected, Ian knew that, but that didn't stop the thought seeping, crawling, growing like poisonous vines through his brain until it was all he could think about. And it was not okay. And he couldn't just move on. And he couldn't just forget.

When Mickey pressed his weight down on him, hands either side, Ian felt caged, anchored in a way that felt good. He felt as though the world around him made sense again with the feel of Mickey's lips on his chest. When he came down from the high of Mickey, it was only then that Ian felt ready to face the world and Southside and his empty-yet-so-full house again.

When Ian was with Mickey, he didn't have to think. He didn't have to worry about what to say or how to react. He didn't have to try and think two steps ahead, like he did with Lip, he didn't have to be a pillar of strength, weighed down with guilt, like he did with Fiona, he didn't have to pretend that things were always okay and smile, like he did with his younger siblings. When he was with Mickey he could escape the wildfire in his head, could shut down his brain. He could just be.

_"Ay fuckhead, you think I could take Bruce Lee if he had an arm missing?"_

_"Fuck. Fuck, Gallagher. Do that again"_

_"You're a dick you know that?"_

_"It's not like I read the damn articles, I like the pictures"_

_"Ay did you hear about that baby that was born with six legs? That shits fucked up man. I had a cousin that was born with a fucking foot coming out of his knee, was so gross"_

_"I gotta ask towelhead for more hours man, dad wants me to start paying fucking rent now that I got me a proper job"_

_"Yo you wanna go to the sox game on Saturday? Got a cousin that's working security, get us in for nothing"_

Ian thought to himself that he could spend forever like this, just days upon days of him and Mickey and his head so clear, filled up with nothing but the two of them. 

He was drawn to Mickey like a moth to a flame and Mickey was the biggest, brightest, most dangerous flame Ian had ever seen and he knew it was going to end badly, knew there was going to be gut-wrenching heartache involved at the end of it, but he didn't mind getting burned if he could have all of this in return.


End file.
